I didn’t want to remind the sheriff that he had spoken favorably of Dixon after Alafair and I had trouble with him. “Does he have an alibi for last night?”
“His neighbors across the river say there was a light on in his barn and they thought they saw him shoeing horses until after midnight.”
“So he’s not your guy?”
“Probably not. But he has information about the Deer Heart girl that he’s not sharing.”
“What kind of information?”
“He thinks she was adopted for reasons other than humanitarian ones.”
“What reasons?”
“He’s a little vague on that.”
“Why’d you call me?” I asked.
“Because I don’t know what the hell I’m dealing with. What makes it worse is that Wyatt Dixon has almost convinced me.”
“Of what?”
“That there’s an evil presence in our midst. That the cave behind Albert Hollister’s house is the source of something that I hate to even think about.”
“Don’t let this guy get to you,” I said.
“Come down here and tell me that after you look at Bill Pepper’s face in the crime scene photos. One of his eyes looked like an eight ball. The coroner says he was alive when he was castrated. Where’s the Horowitz girl?”
I looked out the window. Gretchen’s pickup was parked by the guest cabin. “She didn’t do this,” I said.
“We talked to a homicide investigator at Miami-Dade. She was known in the trade as Caruso. You want to vouch for Caruso, Mr. Robicheaux?”
After Clete was released from the holding jail in Big Fork, he did not ask Gretchen if she’d had anything to do with the death of Bill Pepper. At the cabin, she kept waiting for him to stop talking and look directly in her face and ask the question, but he didn’t. She fixed bacon and scrambled eggs and set his plate on the table and sat down across from him and waited some more. He started eating, buttering a biscuit, drinking his coffee, spearing his fork through the eggs, but he didn’t ask the question.
“I went looking for you,” she said.
“I figured you would,” he replied.
“You didn’t find Pepper, did you?”
“Not alive, I didn’t.”
“You think I did him?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“If he’d drawn down on you or tried to attack you again, you would have blown him out of his socks. Maybe you would have broken a couple of his spokes. But you didn’t have anything to do with what happened inside that cottage. Neither did I. Anyone who thinks different doesn’t know anything about either of us.”
“I told you what I wanted to do to him. I told you how I wanted him to suffer.”
“You’re like most brave people, Gretchen: too brave to know you’re supposed to be afraid, and too good to understand you’re incapable of doing bad.”
She thought she was going to cry.
He stopped eating. “Dave and I did a lot of stuff at NOPD that we don’t like to remember. We called it operating under a black flag. That’s when the Contras and the Colombians were filling our cities with cocaine. But we never did anything beyond what we had to. That’s the only rule there is. You do what you have to, and you never hurt people unnecessarily.” He started eating again.
She got up from the table and went into the bathroom and washed her face and dried it. When she came back out, he was looking at the FedEx mailer she had left on the coffee table. “What’s that?” he said.
“Some Sierra Club guys got ahold of a core sample from an exploratory well drilled on the Canadian side of the frontier. I sent it to a geological lab in Austin. This stuff has the same kind of sulfurous content that’s coming out of the shale-oil operation up in Alberta. Supposedly, it heats up the planet a lot faster than ordinary crude.”
“Pepper left a note. Evidently, some guys scared the hell out of him. They thought maybe you were his girlfriend and you had some information that was harmful to their interests.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I thought the sheriff had his ass on upside down. You think this has something to do with the documentary you’re making?”
“I just got out of film school. Why should anyone be afraid of me?”
“I can’t imagine,” he replied.
That afternoon she took her nine-millimeter Beretta and her Airweight .38 up to the gun range behind Albert’s house. The sun had already gone behind the ridge, and the trees were full of shadows and clattering with robins. Up the arroyo by the abandoned log road, she saw a flock of wild turkeys that had been down to the creek to drink before going to bed. She set up a row of coffee cans on a wood plank suspended between two rocks and clamped on her ear protectors and, from twenty yards away, aimed the Beretta with both arms extended and let off all fourteen rounds in the magazine, blowing the cans into the air and hitting them again as they rolled down the hillside, birds rising from the trees all around her.
She saw the man on horseback out of the corner of her eye but showed no recognition of his presence. She set down the Beretta on Albert’s shooting table and removed the ear protectors and shook out her hair. She picked up the five-shot Airweight and flipped out the cylinder from the frame and picked the rounds one at a time from the ammunition box and plopped them into the chambers, then closed the cylinder, never glancing at the man on horseback. “What do you think you’re doing here?” she said, as though speaking to herself.
“I rent pasture on the other side of the ridge. You shot the doo-doo out of them cans.”
She began picking up the cans and replacing them on the plank. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. You already done it,” he said. He stood up in the stirrups and grabbed the limb of a ponderosa and lifted himself free of the horse, his biceps swelling to the size of softballs. He was wearing a maniacal grin when he dropped to the ground, his shoulders hunched like an ape’s. He caught the reins of the Appaloosa and flipped them around the lower branch of a fir tree. “You’ve got a fourteen-round pre-assault-weapons-ban magazine in that Beretta. That’s right impressive.”
“I think you’re probably a pretty good guy, cowboy. But you’re off your turf,” she said.
“You got a mouth on you. Ain’t many that speaks their mind like that.”
“Does Mr. Hollister mind you riding up here?”
“He never mentioned it.”
“You know who he is?”
He seemed to think about the question. “A famous writer.”
“Have you tried any of his books?”
He looked into space. “I don’t recall. My brain ain’t always in the best of shape,” he said. He was wearing a candy-striped shirt with a rolled white collar. His shirt was pressed and his needle-nosed boots spit-shined, as bright as mirrors even in the shade. “You like rodeos?”
“Sometimes.”
“I furnish rough stock to a mess of them. You like bluegrass music?”
“ ‘Sex, drugs, Flatt and Scruggs.’ ”
“There’s a concert tonight at Three Mile.”
“Maybe another time.”
He sat on a boulder and removed his straw hat. There was a pale band of skin at the top of his forehead. When he looked at her, all she could see were his pupils. The rest of his eyes seemed made of glass. “I ain’t here to bother you. You stood up for me, missy. I owe you,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything. Let’s be clear on that.”
“If you hadn’t been there, Bill Pepper would have put out my light with that Taser. I thought he was gonna dump in his britches when you called him ‘bacon.’ ”
“You want to shoot my Airweight?”
“I’m an ex-felon. Ex-felons ain’t supposed to mess with handguns.”